For many men, spiritual retreats oftentimes take the form of camping, hunting, sailing, and meditation intensives.
The masculine, as consciousness, relishes being free—from everything.
The beauty within empty spaces and desolate places soothes the masculine soul.
The concept of freedom is encoded into our western culture as one of its paramount values. It’s a masculine ideal that resonates in the heart of most men I know, and when you get a taste of it, it’s really hard to come back to the regular world of form, filth, and family.
You’ll find that when men get together in a retreat-style experience, there’s not a lot of talking going on. A feeling of relaxation and freedom comes to most men when they do not have to do anything.
You may wonder what it’s like to go on a meditation retreat and abide in stillness for an extended period of time. The only way to find out is to go on an intentional retreat yourself. You might recoil from all the silence at first, but once you’ve gotten a taste of how solitude nourishes you as a masculine being, then you may find yourself grasping for that feeling all the time because it is uncomplicated and undemanding compared to normal life.
It’s like we’ve remembered or rediscovered something and we don’t want to give it up. We try to hang onto that feeling and we can become edgy and resentful of anything that tries to pull us out of it.
Emptiness can feel profoundly nourishing for men.
Emptiness is the bliss of having the mind go blank, of being immersed in everything that’s happening around us without any sense of self attached to it. Some perceive this as a flow-sate.
A classic way that men touch this feeling is in the emptiness of drinking into oblivion. It’s not a healthy method, but it definitely gives you a taste of the complete dissolution of thinking and it may provide momentary relief from the pressures of life. Other methods include post-ejaculative relaxation and subsequent pull into a deep sleep. Or you may find emptiness in the call of wild open spaces, particularly when it’s free of other humans. This quietude pulls us into walking aimlessly through a forest or sitting by a lake listening to the birds. One can also find emptiness in the stillness of a Zen meditation retreat.
Pretty much any situation where a lot of silence is happening can give men a taste of finding themselves as empty open awareness.
The problem occurs when you come home to normal life and experience disgust and aversion. You may be hypersensitive to anything that disturbs your inner quiet.
There’s a pristine cleanliness associated with these silent spaces, and when compared to the bliss of emptiness and quiet, regular life involving family, filth, and form feels much more sticky. Having your awareness pulled back into the messiness of life can feel like the uncomfortable sensation of stepping into discarded bubble gum on the sidewalk, and then attempting to clean it off by shuffling your feet, only succeeding in becoming even more disgusted. The pristine nature of consciousness seems opposed to and threatened by the messiness of life, particularly the complications of love and family.
Returning to regular life after experiencing the openness of solitude and quiet can be a bummer. But these are critical junctures where practical insights into spiritual practice can occur. Properly navigated, these transitions can lead to profound insights and lasting shifts in consciousness deeper than those encountered on retreat.
The problem is, if we try to touch these problems, we lose our spacious awareness and quietude, and we get sucked back into familiar patterns of thinking and reactivity. We may respond to these sticky situations by cursing, getting frustrated, and pulling ourselves out of the bliss of empty spaciousness. It’s embarrassing how easily we can be drawn out of our peace.
So the question is, how can we sustain a heightened state of awareness while being immersed in the normality of everyday life? How can you find your way in the midst of work and the muddle of relationships? Is it even possible?
Training to stay open, relaxed, and free in awareness, no matter the situation, is infinitely valuable.
If your spiritual realization is so fragile that it can only happen in remote areas or when doing very specific practices, and if it disappears when you leave those spaces and start interacting with your family, partner, or coworkers, then the existential stakes get high. You have had a taste of satori, perhaps, or you experienced the bliss of quietude in nature, but how meaningful is that if we fall right back into our contracted patterns of thinking and relating?
There’s a disconnect between where people run their spiritual lives and where they deal with the vulgarity and messiness of ordinary life.
At the heart of this dilemma is when we get lured into reactive action. We’re not accessing our deeper intelligence—you can feel your awareness contracting when you become energetically activated or triggered. Painful experiences from our past move us back into a state of limited awareness. We regress age-wise emotionally, and our ability to navigate unexpected disturbances escapes us.
I want us to investigate the loss of our power and freedom. It’s not happening to us, we are abdicating it.
We’ll also touch on some ways in which you might be able to utilize these disturbances to deepen your meditative practice and ground your practice in ordinary circumstances.
In heightened emotional states, beyond the joy of being high, there’s also the possibility for profundity and relaxation. You don’t have to meditate in a pristine, quiet, empty room to experience peace. Once you learn the mechanics of awareness and how to rest as consciousness within your body, you have the possibility of relaxing awareness so that it can meld with any object of attention. Not forcefully but relaxedly. Then you can begin applying meditation techniques in messier environments. You can allow awareness to be with any situation, enabling the inherent energy within the situation to be accessed and worked with instead of run away from. This is real tantra—living as freedom, within any situation.
Within the heart, you can feel whether you’re activated, energized, or reactive.
There are visceral signs that appear when we’re becoming emotionally unregulated. For masculine beings, when our homeostasis has been interrupted by something, our instinctive response is to try to find something or someone at fault. We assume there’s a source cause that needs to be corrected or eliminated.
This is seen often in intimate relationships, where men try to fix everything—which drives their more feminine partners crazy. Feminine partners don’t always want solutions to problems; they want to feel heard and understood. They want to encounter your open presence and interest in what they are experiencing and feeling emotionally. Until they sense you knowing, or emphatically comprehending what is going on inside their experience, they will not trust any corrective action or solution that you bring. If they feel you reactively trying to change anything, before feeling them and acknowledging their heart, it might even feel abusive, even though you have positive intentions of helping.
Practice being open and sensitively in tune with what she is experiencing. And if you can address the problem after that — that’s icing on the cake.
Therein lies a secret to gaining self-mastery and sustaining heightened states of openness, creativity, and freedom in the midst of chaos. It’s within the inner space of the heart, the center of our felt emotional reality, where the kingly seat of freedom is located. It’s this inner realm of feelings and emotions that almost no one practices with. Instead, it’s assumed that whatever we’re feeling inside is due to something outside. It’s more productive to regard your partner’s problem as possibly due to your limited vision and imprecise perception. There are no problems unless you make something into one.
Addressing the filth
This world is a realm of chaos and dirt. Houses and minds accumulate stuff that hides the underlying beauty. This is not a problem; it’s just part of life. For spiritual practice to matter, it must also apply to the messy, earthy parts of life, or else it is only a form of escape, not sovereignty.
The best spiritual practice occurs after losing our balance and personally discovering how to recover equanimity amidst distraction and emotional pain. Deep practice does not depend upon ideal circumstances, it’s discovering freedom within situations that normally cause you to collapse or retreat. This is why tantric practitioners in ancient India would go to cremation grounds to do spiritual practices. They would intentionally activate their revulsion, reactivity, and fear in order to feel, love, and ultimately transcend it.
The insights from spiritual retreats follow you home afterward. Navigating how to bring the peace and nourishment you received back home to family, intimate partners, and work is the challenge. The secret is to remember the relaxation in mind and body you felt and anchor the tacit memory in your body and breath. Stop and pause to do this before you walk back into your home or workplace.
Briefly close your eyes and call forth your favorite moments from your retreat or time in nature. Where were you? Vividly recall the setting and surroundings. As you remember these scenes, notice how your heart's and belly's emotional centers feel. How were you breathing within these treasured memories? Notice how tension is absent in the parts of your body where it normally appears.
Open your eyes and realize that the recalled sensations are still present within you now. They are in your mind and body, or else you wouldn’t be able to recall and feel them. Nothing can take these away from you at the depth of your core being unless you allow it, or you forget. They are part of you. The retreat brought you back into touch with your core reality.
To remain connected to the freedom of your retreat, anchor the specific sensations, emotions, and spacious awareness into your breath. Inhale into the full panoramic memory, and as you exhale, release any striving to hold onto the memory. Relax into trusting that whatever you recalled is always present deep within you.
As you return to the cacophony of life, check within periodically to reconnect to the feelings and sensations you had on retreat. You’ll forget this core of your being—until you remember. Simply check-in with yourself and notice that you can evoke a palpable connection to the deep openness within you. Each time you remember, notice the shift in your present awareness and feeling state as you compare it to the openness you know at your depth.
The way you practice through the crud of the day is to smile and know that your calm center within is always there waiting for you to recall it. It’s not a big deal to forget this; that’s what this earthly realm is about—this is a place of forgetting your core truth. Simply recall the depth that you were on retreat, and feel the purity of that, which is undisturbed by the filth all around you. Have humor about your forgetfulness. You don’t have to get sucked into messy situations if you remember to relax and trust the depth within you, one that you can viscerally remember.
Authentic power for men is about realizing your freedom in any situation.
Meditative practices enable us to root down into our souls and fully inhabit our bodies. From the relaxed seat of being that these practices reveal, turmoil and chaos don’t seem as threatening. Living from your depth of being is like calmly resting on the ocean bottom, watching the storm above. You’ll still feel the tug and pull of the waves gently rocking you, and you can witness the drama of surf, foam, and rolling waves, but you are not lost in the crashing surf struggling to survive.
Depth is your capacity to stay open and sensitively in tune with whatever arises. It’s a wakeful inner state of awareness sensitively in tune with whatever is arising. In this way, consciousness is a kind of muscle. Much like going to the gym, yogic techniques can help you strengthen your capacity to sustain open awareness, rest in authentic power and become more comfortable with stress.
Without quality instruction in this art, you risk practicing with imperfect form and possibly injury. Even worse, your perception of what is good and true can become warped and inaccurate. I discovered this myself after years of solo mediation practice. I envisioned a perfect sitting posture where you looked like a garden statue. Sitting in meditation became painful, but I continued to soldier on, only strengthening my poor posture and egoic striving.
Through grace and a bit of luck, I finally came to study with Reggie Ray and Will Johnson, and I finally saw what I had been doing wrong physically and especially internally in how I related to mind and emotions. I’m so grateful for their instruction and feedback and how they modeled compassion toward self and others. I didn’t realize how harsh and judgemental I had been with spiritual practice and meditation until I spent time with them and genuinely felt their demonstration of another way.
Sustaining your inner freedom under stress is like being skilled at sailing.
When sailing, it feels good to be challenged once you get the basics down. We might enjoy a nice sunny day of sailing, but our greatest stories are often when the conditions were challenging, and yet you survived to tell your tale.
Similarly, when you navigate any life crisis well, you find a degree of satisfaction and inner pleasure that far exceeds the relief in avoiding feared situations. You may have never imagined voluntarily going into some of these circumstances. Still, when you navigate them adequately, you create deeper confidence in your ability to navigate this chaotic world.
I invite you to join me as I pay forward the deep, valuable lessons I’ve received from my teachers. For a free initial consultation, complete this request: https://sunyata.info/contact We can go over the foundational practice of meditation, and find out how you can apply this in your life circumstances.
Enrolment is open now for https://sunyata.info/work-with-me/2022/living-tantra-for-men-awakening-the-lions-roar
For men and women who want to expereince the depth of love that their hearts and body yearn for, check out the https://sunyata.info/awakening-into-intimacy retreat. It begins on September 26, 2022. Enrollment is now open.